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- Q. My training is in accounting and finance,
and I have recently started doing some economics-based IS research. In my
areas, academics use a web site called the Social
Science Research Network, which has been used to share papers among colleagues.
They have already climbed the learning curve and I think they have a reasonable
product. Does it make sense to simply link on to what they are doing instead
of reinventing the wheel again for systems academics?
- A. I see efforts such as SSRN
as being complementary to what I'm doing. I plan to look at SSRN some more,
and may very well put some of my materials there also, to increase their exposure.
My approach is targeted toward a broader audience: non-academics as well
as academics. By emphasizing search engine rankings, I make my material
available to people who, because of lack of information or possibly even
distaste for academic research, might never find SSRN or other similar ventures.
The ultimate goal is to increase the accessibility of research to people
who could or should use it. SSRN is working toward this goal with a top-down
approach, while I am working toward this same goal but starting from the
level of individuals. Academic publishing is an area that is in a state
of ferment, and I think we should be operating in a "let 1000 flowers
bloom" mode. If one approach is substantially better than another,
the marketplace will eventually sort that out.
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- Q. I wonder how much "external use" there will
be for these search engine supported web pages. If you do expect to get hits
from "normal people" (i.e., not researchers searching to complete their lit
reviews), then wouldn't the image/graphics/look have a greater importance
(kind of a psychological effect regarding the "quality" of the site)?
- A. This is a very valid consideration. One of
the assignments for the student project team will be to develop approximately
5 templates with an image/graphics/look that is much better than my page.
(I received a low grade in Art in the 8th grade, and never had any further
instruction in the subject.)
- Q. Content wise, if every researcher builds
a page and cross-link others with similar interests, who gets to become the
"main page" (the one that ranks highest on the search engines)?
- A. Correct. The people who do the best job with
individual pages will have, in effect, the main pages for their categories
of research because they will have the highest rankings and the most traffic.
- Q. Does this resemble a portal, with the exception
that it is focused on research with a number of other useful links?
- A. The entry page for each person's web site
is like a mini-portal, but I think the concept may be more analogous to a
web ring.
- Q. Don't get me wrong, personally I'd love to
have such a site developed for my research (I've actually started doing that
way back and then got tired of trying to update it...I guess that's where
it is difficult: how to constantly update the info with everything else that
is going on?).
- A. In doing this, I found that it is a lot of
work to set it up initially, and would be even more so for a person who has
as many publications as you. That is one of the reasons I want to have a student
team write some ASP code that will automate the process.
After the initial effort, maintenance could be limited to adding new articles
as they are published, and occasionally checking the links (which the Atomz
engine on the entry page does for you automatically whenever it indexes
the site). This is assuming that the page stays on the same server indefinitely.
If there is the remotest possibility that a person might go to another institution,
the site should be on an outside server. This way the established constituency,
including hotlinks and bookmarks, isn't lost when a person changes jobs.
I think this is something that will appeal more to people just starting
out (e.g., doctoral students
and recent graduates) rather than people who have been in the field for
20 years and have a lot of publications. I'm in this for the long haul,
and see it as something that could take 5-10 years to mature. However it
would be an embarrassment to the IS field if another field implements something
similar before we do.
- Q. Also, couldn't we all contribute to the useful
links sections since most of us have developed their list of, for example,
telecommuting sites of interest.
- A. Excellent point. One way to facilitate this
would be a central site--perhaps an ISWorld page--where people could "register"
their pages and URLs, providing keywords for each category page. This information
would go into a database, which visitors could search by category. People
could look at others' similar pages, and add links that they see that would
also be appropriate on their own pages.
The key to a central registry would be to have people enter their own data
on a self-service basis to automate the process. It would be impossible
to maintain on any other basis.
- Q. It is important to allow every researcher
the discretion to organize their work in any way they choose & I think
you have done that with the flexible template. The downside of that is that
the viewers do not get the complete experience pertaining to a topic--i.e.,
you can showcase your research but the networking effect (to relate common
bodies of knowledge & researchers) is not the primary aim of this site,
is it?
- A. Absolutely correct. The primary goal is to
increase the impact of IS researchers and their research, outside the world
of academia. The hope is that this will produce increased respect and influence
within the ivory towers, and will lead to some necessary adjustments in the
way our research is evaluated by our employers. However there should be some
secondary networking impacts via the cross-links to researchers and publications
that cover the same categories. (Also see "Online
or Invisible?," which is very relevant to tenure and promotion in the
short run.)
- Q. When you announce this to IS World wouldn't
it be useful to clearly delineate:
(a) what this template represents?
- A. Absolutely. The previous response and this
FAQ page are steps in that direction.
- (b) how is it going to appear in IS World (e.g., in the IS World directory?)
- A. I can develop a prototype explanatory web
page. It will provide a more detailed explanation of the concept, and will
be designed from the perspective of possibly evolving into an ISWorld web
page.
- (c) why is this effort superior to promoting your own personal site with
its research links?
- A. I'm not sure that it is that much better
than promoting your own personal site. My major concern, as voiced in the
latter part of my CAIS "Dare
to be Relevant" paper, is that most IS researchers are not doing a very
good job of promoting their own sites. If a substantial number of researchers
incorporate the suggested search engine optimization features, and incorporate
site-specific search and logging of visitors within their existing sites,
it would accomplish most of my goals for this.
- (d) what is the long term vision for integrating these templates that "n"
people adopt?
- A. One possibility is a central site (maybe
at ISWorld) where researchers could register their entry and research category
pages, along with keywords for each page, into a searchable database. Such
a site could evolve into a portal for accessing IS research.
If a high proportion of researchers made their content available in this
form, it could undermine other efforts to make IS research available on
a membership or subscription basis. However because it will still require
a fair amount of work to set up the personal sites even if the code generator
project is successful, I doubt that this concept will achieve a high enough
penetration rate in the early years to threaten the established publication
outlets. If and when it does reach that status, I think the trends in scholarly
publishing will have by that time reached the point of representing a similar
threat to the status quo even without a general implementation of this concept.
- (e) what is the next step (short run action) that researchers should take?
- A. Exchanging links with researchers who have
similar perspectives is a possibility. After the student project is completed,
adopters could use the threaded discussion list
to share ideas for innovations that they have implemented on their sites.
- Q. Wouldn't it also be useful to add to IS World
a site that provides guidance on specific aspects of this project, including
details that you added in the red annotations?
- A. Such a web page could be very helpful. However
in the mean time, I provide a lot of coverage of these issues in the Appendix
of "Dare
to be Relevant."
- Q. If the page you propose is to serve as a
general research site for publicizing IS research, shouldn't it be an ISWorld
effort?
- A. I can see several ways of involving ISWorld.
In addition to the registry and guidance pages mentioned above, there could
be a web page with information on the policies of IS publishing outlets regarding
posting one copy of a person's publication on a personal web site.
- Q. Shouldn't this be oriented to AIS rather
than a personal site?
- A. My concept is an aggregation of personal
web sites that will collectively generate much more exposure for, and societal
impact from, IS research than it receives under the current system. I originally
planned to use the AIS logo because this aggregate effort could also generate
a substantial increase in exposure for AIS. Since it could take a while to
get the necessary approvals, I decided to temporarily defer this issue in
order to advance the project more quickly.
It is not a necessary part of the concept for these sites to plug AIS.
It could be done without any organizational affiliations, or I could investigate
the possibility of hooking it up with INFORMS, ACM, or DSI. I don't know
whether I have the time to approach many groups, but I wouldn't be surprised
if some contacted me.
- Q. Doesn't it also need a lot of indexing and
cross indexing, so you can see things by topic, by investigator, perhaps even
by school?
- A. To answer this, let me mention a recent personal
experience. Some of my colleagues were in my office at Cal Poly. Bob Stumpf
wanted to show me the web page for his classes. He said the easiest way to
find it was to search Google using the keywords: Stumpf Java. His page came
up as the first item of the results. So I put in: Westfall telecommuting,
and my personal page was the first item. Dan Manson tried something, it could
have been: Manson "information systems" and his page popped right up.
My conclusion is that, after a web site designed according to the principles
in my prototype has has been submitted to search engines and has been up
and running for a few months, it should be readily accessible to anyone
who knows how to effectively use a good
search engine. Therefore although cross indexing is an excellent idea,
it isn't an immediate priority because it can be handled by choosing appropriate
keywords in searches.
I can see the value of setting up a web site, possibly at ISWorld, with
the URLs and email addresses of researchers who have established such web
sites. That would greatly facilitate incorporating reciprocal links to other
researchers in these personal web sites.
- Q. Don't you have to think of the practicalities
of getting people to contribute?
- A. If the web sites are created on an individual
basis, there doesn't need to be any hierarchical structure. The whole thing
could, like the Internet itself, be largely self-organizing.
- Q. Don't you have to worry about who owns copyrights?
Some journals won't let you reprint much more than the abstract, if that.
- A. Excellent point. I can't find any agreements
for my journal papers, but I believe that several said that I could post one
copy on a personal web site. I did find the release for AMCIS 2001, and it
said I retained ownership of the copyright. I would advise people to follow
whatever restrictions were placed on their publication agreement, but go as
far as they could within those constraints.
- Q. Isn't there a whole systems problem here
that you have to think your way through?
- A. I've been thinking a lot about the implications
for IS publishing outlets. You and I are old enough to remember when people
feared that TV was going to kill the movie theaters, and that pay TV was going
to kill free TV. Later they thought that VCRs were going to kill the movie
industry. This type of thing has played out with similar results on a number
of occasions in various industries.
My hypothesis is that web sites such as I am proposing will actually increase
the demand for IS publications from libraries and industry, because they
will increase exposure to some of the more useful research that we publish.
However because these papers are scattered over a large number of web sites,
and because some researchers will not develop their own web sites, the Internet
will not be as comprehensive a source of IS research as the publications
themselves.